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Xavier Herbert, 'Inky' Stephensen and the Problems Of Cultural Studies RESEARCH ARTICLE Review Encountering Indigeneity: Xavier Herbert, Vol. 23, No. 2 ‘Inky’ Stephensen and the Problems of Settler 2017 Nationalism Dan Tout Faculty of Education and Arts, Federation University, Churchill Campus, PO Box 3191 Gippsland Mail Centre VIC 3841, Australia Corresponding author: Dan Tout, Faculty of Education and Arts, Federation University, Churchill Campus, PO Box 3191 Gippsland Mail Centre VIC 3841, Australia; [email protected] DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/csr.v23i2.5823 © 2017 by the author(s). This Article History: Received 12/22/2017; Revised 8/21/2017; Accepted 8/10/2017; is an Open Access article Published 27/11/2017 distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License (https:// Abstract creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties The 1930s in Australia was a period marked by rising awareness of and attention to Australia’s to copy and redistribute the ‘half-caste problem’. Released and promoted in tandem with the 1938 sesquicentenary of material in any medium or format and to remix, Australia’s settler colonisation, Xavier Herbert’s novel Capricornia appeared as a searing transform, and build upon the protest against the exclusion of so-called ‘half-castes’ from white Australia. The novel itself material for any purpose, even was published by the Publicist Publishing Company, platform for rationalist and businessman commercially, provided the W.J. Miles and editor and polemicist P.R. ‘Inky’ Stephensen, both strict advocates of a racially original work is properly cited and states its license. pure white Australia. Yet together, Herbert and his patrons capitalised on the sesquicentenary, and the Day of Mourning protests they helped organise, to promote what they proclaimed the Citation: Tout, D. 2017. ‘Great Australian Novel’. This article reads Herbert’s racial understandings in relation to those Encountering Indigeneity: of Stephensen, and reads both in relation to the prevailing circumstances of 1930s Australia, Xavier Herbert, ‘Inky’ Stephensen and the Problems as well as the underlying dynamics of settler colonialism. Whereas Stephensen subscribed to of Settler Nationalism. the ‘Aryan Aborigines’ hypothesis and emphasised Australia’s supposed racial purity, Herbert Cultural Studies Review, celebrated instead the potentiality of ‘Euraustralian’ hybridity. While these approaches are 23:2, 141-161. http://dx.doi. org/10.5130/csr.v23i2.5823 ostensibly at odds, this article argues instead that they share a common drive towards settler indigenisation and independence as their ultimate aims. ISSN 1837-8692 | Published by UTS ePRESS | http://epress. Keywords lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/csrj/index settler colonialism; nationalism; indigenisation; race; literature 141 DECLARATION OF CONFLICTING INTEREST The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. FUNDING The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Tout Introduction Richard White has labelled questions about what, whether and when the Australian nation is or might be ‘a national obsession’.1 In attempting to construct a national culture and identity, settler Australians, like settlers elsewhere, have invested in the establishment of a national literary tradition.2 According to Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra, the project of national literary- cultural construction has entailed: establishing a distinctively Australian tradition, complete with a Great Australian Writer and a Great Australian Novel, whose manifest greatness would at last prove the colonists’ right to belong, both to the metropolitan centre and in the territory that they had invaded and colonised, Australia itself.3 Writers and critics have at various historical moments argued over different dimensions of the search for belonging Hodge and Mishra identify—some emphasising Australia’s British inheritance, others stressing the production of new, ‘native’ cultural forms. From a perspective emphasising the first aspect of Hodge and Mishra’s dual search for belonging, in 1956 Alec Hope described ‘the mythical Great Australian Novel’ as the ‘Bunyip of Australian literature’.4 It is appropriate, however, that it was the critic, publisher and polemicist Percy Reginald ‘Inky’ Stephensen, also known as ‘the Bunyip Critic’, who, from an antithetical perspective, hailed Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia (which he played a central role in editing and publishing) as an ‘epoch-making Great Australian novel’ upon its publication in 1938.5 In this assessment Stephensen was not alone, and if ever a novel attempted to fulfil the second aspect of Hodge and Mishra’s purpose—to ‘prove the colonists’ right to belong … in the territory that they had invaded and colonised’, albeit by castigating the colonists’ with the history and the consequences of their own invasion—Capricornia was it. The circumstances surrounding the novel’s publication, as well as the broader settler nationalist projects of both Stephensen and Herbert, reveal more contradictions than they resolve. Published in 1938 by the Publicist Publishing Company to coincide with the first Aboriginal Day of Mourning protests against the sesquicentenary of Australian colonisation, Capricornia represented the highpoint of Stephensen’s publishing career.6 Paradoxically, the Publicist Publishing Company was then, and is still today, regarded as a vehicle for Stephensen’s increasingly extreme variety of racially exclusive, isolationist nationalism.7 Yet Herbert’s novel appeared as a searing protest against the exclusion of so-called ‘half-castes’ from settler Australia, and as an anti-imperialist condemnation of Australia’s settler-colonial foundations. Together, Herbert and his patrons capitalised on the sesquicentenary, and the Day of Mourning protests they helped organise, to promote what they proclaimed as ‘the novel of the Spirit of the Land’.8 This article compares Herbert’s racial understandings to those of Stephensen, and reads them both in relation to the prevailing circumstances of 1930s Australia. At a historical moment marked by ambivalence in Australia’s relationship with metropolitan England, Stephensen and Herbert sought to establish settler Australians’ national-cultural independence. In doing so, however, at a moment marked by the demise of the ‘doomed race’ ideal, they found themselves confronting the prospect of a persistent Indigenous presence within the settler nation they sought to claim. While Stephensen subscribed to the ‘Aryan Aborigines’ hypothesis and emphasised Australia’s supposed racial purity, positing himself and the Australian national culture he sought to construct as inheritors of ‘the mantle of belonging to the land’,9 Herbert celebrated the potentiality of ‘Euraustralian’ hybridity to overcome his own, and by extension his compatriots’, illegitimate status as ‘alien’ and ‘invader’.10 These 142 Cultural Studies Review, Vol. 23, No. 2, 2017 Encountering Indigeneity approaches are ostensibly at odds, yet they share a drive towards settler indigenisation and independence as their common, overriding concerns. A story of two Australias? The standard story of Australian national cultural development has been structured around the conflict between the ‘two arch-opponents’ of Australian cultural and political life: ‘the Anglo-Australian loyalists and the radical Australian nationalists’,11 the latter ‘creative, original and truly Australian’, the former ‘sterile, derivative and suburban’.12 In this story of ‘two Australias’, Britain plays the part of ‘the mother country’, while ‘Australia is the child who reaches maturity, flexes its muscles and engages in several other pleasing metaphors’.13 Various periodisations of this narrative are possible, but most feature the 1890s as a moment of adolescence—whether one of youthful exuberance, full of promise, or one marked by arrogance and immaturity—followed by a ‘coming of age’ in the post-war period. Such narratives typically frame the 1930s as a period of stalled development. There have, of course, been dissenters from the nationalist imperative, and various nomenclatures have been used to describe the opposing critical traditions: ‘localists and universalists’, ‘democratic populists and Anglophile elitists’, ‘nationalists and internationalists’— even ‘“Abos” and “Pommies”’, as A.A. Phillips once suggested.14 Yet even those who have most vociferously denied the need for, and the value of, a national literary tradition have, in so doing, defined themselves in relation to it, and have typically bought into the same notions of national maturity that have been central to such debates since their inception. For writers such as Alec Hope, for example, national maturity remained a necessity, even if only as one more step along the path towards the re-integration of Australian into world literature.15 Even John Docker’s arch-metaphysicist Vincent Buckley was concerned with ‘the maturity of Australian life’, and saw in the tradition of ‘Brennan and the Brennanites’ and their attempt to ‘fuse the two traditions’ of nationalism and vitalist romanticism ‘our best hope of maturity’.16 H.M. Green described the ‘development of Australian literature’ as entailing two related but independent aspects: ‘the gradual growth of the native at the expense of the overseas element and their fusion into something new; and the gradual attainment of absolute value’.17
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